The image that sums up how bad the election was for Labour - and how incredible for the Tories

The election result has been a sensational result for Boris Johnson which has shown the Labour vote decimated in areas previously considered its heartland.

The result is set to be the best result for the Conservatives since 1987 and the worst for Labour since before the Second World War.

And if anything sums up the scale of catastrophe for Labour, it’s the side-by-side maps that show the wave of blue that fell across England and Wales in today’s election result compared to the 2017 outcome which saw Theresa May lose her majority.

One particularly striking graphic on the BBC shows presenter Sophie Raworth able to walk, as she describes it, from east coast to west.

The image showed how Labour’s red wall in the north has crumbled as the Tories ate into it.

Raworth, walking around the BBC’s map, which is formatted to make every constituency the same size, said: “There is still a wall there, there is still a line across England, but it is much thinner than it was before and we now have a Conservative wall as well.

“I can literally walk across the whole of the north west and the north east of England and all these seats that are coming down the coast, they have all gone blue.”

Additional graphics show even more fully the extent of the Conservatives’ election win and Labour’s defeat which has seen Boris Johnson’s party secure a big majority.

The maps clearly show how the Conservatives ate into Labour’s seats in the north east, north west and Wales in an outcome that at first glance could vindicate the Tories’ choice to make Brexit a central theme of their campaign.

The red wall - a strip of seats that often vote Labour - has been eaten into substantially in the north west.

They also show how the SNP’s dominance in Scotland, which saw them sweep up all but a handful of seats there.

It has proved to be a disastrous night for Labour, which shed a number of seats and lose seats it has held for decades to the Conservatives.

Concerns about Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s stance on Brexit have both been blamed for the party’s terrible performance.

Mr Corbyn has announced he will step down as leader when the party decides how to move forward.